Using a C.H.I.P and a hacked-apart SDR dongle, I setup an iGate near my parent’s house. It’s one of the only iGates for miles and miles. It managed to receive a few packets. I need to look into replacing the stock SDR antenna, but I’m guessing that I need a better location as well. Hmmm.
This weekend on my hike to Snow Lake, I tried out the automatic beaconing feature of my Kenwood TH-D72A. I thought I had everything setup and working, but obviously, I didn’t. During the hike I discovered that I could manually tune to the APRS frequency, and the radio would broadcast the packet properly. That lead me to believe that the radio wouldn’t broadcast APRS when tuned via a memory channel.
While hiking the High Divide Trail, I sent an APRS packet from Heart Lake in the Olympic National Park with my crapply Boafeng UV-5R and a rollup J-Pole antenna. When I returned to civilization, I noticed that the tranmission was picked up in Canada! Maybe that’s childsplay to some people, but it seemed pretty cool to me.
My name is Dustin Brewer and I got my Amateur Extra license on 2014-12-30. I became interested in amateur radio after a bit of time playing with Arduinos/RF24L01+ radios, and tinkering a bit with software-defined radio (specifically ADS-B). After studying for a couple weeks, I found an exam happening close to me. I took all three tests in one sitting because I did not want to have to pay the test-taking fee multiple times.